


Dust Thou Art

by AManAdrift



Series: Scenes from the Life of Phil Shepard [6]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Mindoir, Pre-Canon, Sole Survivor (Mass Effect)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-20 21:05:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19384654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AManAdrift/pseuds/AManAdrift
Summary: 16-year-old Phil Shepard is found in the ruins of the Mindoir colony by an Alliance medic.





	Dust Thou Art

Philip Shepard opened his eyes. He had been forced back to wakefulness by the fact that his face was so choked and caked with concrete dust that he literally couldn’t breathe. Even so, it barely seemed worth it: his face and a part of his right arm were all of him that wasn’t buried in the rubble of the fallen administration building, and the ruins of the colony all around him were quiet. Quiet as what, he didn’t particularly want to pick out a cliché.

As if in recoil from the direction of that particular train of thought, he made a convulsive movement of his free arm. Even as he was doing it he felt regret: it would either finish unburying the thing or wrench his shoulder, and for a sickening moment the odds seemed to favour the latter. Then his elbow came free and he managed to wipe the worst of the dust off his face before trying to spit out what was still choking him. His mouth was horribly dry, but he managed to clear his airway, just about.

With not much else to do, he nearly let himself sleep again, but a jolt of pain from his left leg brutally kept him in the land of the living. It had started as a wriggle, an instinctive attempt to get a little more comfortable in the narrow crevice the fall of the ceiling had left him lying in. Turned out that was a bad idea. Try not to do it again. So. He stayed perfectly still perforce, and let his mind wander.

He remembered the varren. How many times he’d drifted in and out of consciousness since the raid, he couldn’t remember, let alone how much actual time it amounted to. One thing he definitely did remember was waking up to find himself looking straight into the bug-eyes of a batarian war-beast. His instincts had told him to freeze — not that he’d had much choice — and he and the varren had just… looked at each other. There was no doubt in his mind but that the beast recognised him — within the limits of its frame of reference anyway: it was a predator and he was helpless, immobilised, therefore prey.

Presently, there had been a rattle of inhuman language and the varren had run off to answer its master’s call. By swivelling his eyes, Phil could just see a pair of batarians tramping through the ruins of Town with the varren at their heels. He couldn’t imagine what they might be doing if they _weren’t_ looking for survivors, to eke out their takings from their slave raid, but if they _were_ , why hadn’t the varren alerted them that he was here? It was an imponderable, but that wouldn’t stop him from pondering it for more years to come than he knew.

His eyes half closed, but he threw them back up, and for lack of any better kind of exercise to take he started to flail awkwardly around with his free arm, eventually using a bit more diligence as he tested exactly how his range of motion was limited by the fact that his shoulder was still partially buried. Rather than let his mind wander, he paid the closest attention to the sensations in his arm, hand and fingers: _ah, that’s the broken edge of that breezeblock, no, I can’t quite reach all the way along that crack in it_. Eventually he was through, though, even counting every twinge and graze, and he gave in to the memories: the contrast between the determined set of his mother’s jaw and the nervous way her left hand had shifted, trying to get a grip on the unfamiliar forend of her rifle; the worried look his dad had shot back over his shoulder at him and Jen. Mom and Dad had tried to argue, of course, but Jen had picked up a weapon and given a nod to Sarge, who was pointing out at the time that anyone who didn’t fight would just get taken, so… And God bless them, they’d tried to at least march in front of their kids if they couldn’t keep them out of the battle entirely, but they were just stretched too thin to even form two ranks. In the end, as they’d spread out, Phil had stuck by his big sister, and as the orbital artillery started to hit, they’d lost sight of their parents…

There was nothing in what happened next that Phil’s mind didn’t want to shy away from: Jen going from feeling, thinking, calling-him-a-dork-but-usually-affectionately-at-least life to nothingness like someone flipped a switch — up on the slaver ship, somebody had done precisely that, a part of his mind pointed out mordantly — the fact that literally nobody he knew was left — his parents, Lizzie, Father Jacques, old man Bertrand… they were all either dead or taken, and there was no way of knowing which — yeah, nowhere in there was there anything he could dwell on and stay sane. Time for another exciting round of ‘Count the Rocks!’ He suppressed a wild urge to giggle.

“…riously though,” an approaching voice gave Phil more than enough to distract himself with. “Rothbard makes chief before you? Sorry, corp, but that’s just bullshit.”

“Well, I appreciate that, Fairlie…” The second voice was quieter and sounded distracted, but they were definitely getting closer. “But is this really the time? Or the place?”

“Sure, why not? I mean, you _know_ we’re too late. Fuck, just look at this place…”

Phil could hear the soldiers’ footsteps now, and he tensed, getting ready to get himself noticed. A part of him wondered how many hours — days? — it had been since he last tried to speak. The rest of him yelled ‘Wonder later!’ inside his head. Even now he felt the sense of embarrassed constraint that is born of having a mother who dislikes… disliked loud noises, and a sister who was apt to demonstrate exactly how Mom would react by making them. He fought it down, made a heroic effort to call out to the soldiers before they could pass by, and… _maybe_ raised a puff of the omnipresent dust. There was no ingrained impediment to waving his arm, on the other hand, and he made it lurch convulsively back and forth. _Look! Look! Oh, please look!_ He thought, and the desperation emboldened him: he actually managed to emit a cracked and raspy “Hey!”

“Holy shit!” It was the second voice, Phil thought. The corporal. After a pause, just long enough for a switched-on intellect to confirm the evidence pouring in over the ‘eye’ channel, it went on: “Medic! We’ve got a survivor here! Medic!” They sounded in his ears like — correction: they _were_ — magic words, and an immense wave of relief crashed prematurely over him: he was found; he had done his part; now he could rest a little…

“Whoa, there, buddy! Stay with me, OK?”

 _How dare this person touch me?_ An absurdly intense burst of resentment was Phil’s first response to the feeling of a hand on his face, shaking him awake and wiping the worst of the dust off. Then his eyes opened and he responded more proportionately to what was going on: someone with a lean, olive-skinned face and an aquiline nose was bending over him, looking worried yet purposeful, and all in all that was probably for the best.

“Here you go,” the medic said, popping the straw from a canteen into Phil’s mouth in a businesslike fashion. Later, after a long and eventful career, full of friends and _Gemütlichkeit_ , as well as drama and explosions, he would look back and remember those few mouthfuls of water among the top three drinks he’d ever taken.

“My name’s Leon,” the medic told him, snapping a band onto his conveniently accessible wrist, then taking the straw away before he could drink too much. “What’s yours?”

“Phil.” He surprised himself by getting the monosyllable out pretty loud and clear now he’d wet his whistle.

Leon looked back at his omnitool, clenched his jaw, and shook his head. “O.K., Phil, we have engineers coming to dig you out of here, but…” He paused, sighed, and went on: “…I’m not going to bullshit you; we really need to get you stabilised, like, now.” He paused again, his eyes tracking arbitrarily as he visibly weighed pros and cons. “How much room to move do you have under there?”

“S’heavy on my chest, but I can breathe,” Phil rasped. It was remarkable how fast his throat had dried again… Leon nodded, and he went on: “My left leg is trapped: something… the _edge_ of something is pressing on it.” Leon looked: later Phil would be shown the metre-thick concrete support column that the batarian artillery had managed to shift. It was safe to say his leg wasn’t supporting the _entire_ weight of the thing. At the moment. After some experimental wriggling, he added: “My right leg’s actually pretty free.”

Leon, by this point, had pushed back the remains of a sleeve from Phil’s forearm, and was busily wiping it down with an alcohol swab. But he nodded again anyway. “You’ve heard of medigel?” He asked, then promptly vanished from Phil’s sight, so that he had to croak out a “Yeah” as well as nodding back.

“Well,” Leon went on, holding up a syrette where Phil could see it. “This stuff’s similar: an experimental version you can inject, heal you from the inside out.” He paused to wrap a cuff around the highest point of Phil’s arm that he could reach, then went on: “The bad news is… it causes convulsions.” He looked Phil in the eye. “You’re gonna thrash around, maybe do your leg some more damage, and — I’m sorry, buddy — it’s gonna hurt like hell. I can’t give you any of the painkillers I have on me: your blood pressure…” He tailed off, and took a firm grip on Phil’s hand, straightening the arm out as best he could. He grinned as a thought visibly occurred to him. “The good news? My wife had twins recently, so you can squeeze my hand as hard as you want!” Phil smiled weakly back, until the fateful question came: “You ready?”

He swallowed — grittily — clenched his teeth, and nodded. Leon nodded back, and a moment later Phil felt the scratch as the needle entered the vein. There was an awful moment of wait-for-it as Leon taped the cannula down, and then…

“Gyaaah!” Leon watched Phil’s eyes widen and his pupils shrink to pinpoints. “Holy… nnnngggg. Son of a… gdschmfa!” He’d clearly taken Leon as his word, Leon thought as he focused on gripping Phil’s hand and trying not to let his eyes water. Mostly, though, he was trying not to laugh at the way that, convulsions or no convulsions, the kid apparently felt it vitally necessary not to swear.

As the convulsions subsided Leon watched Phil’s body go slack, and his eyes close. He checked the readout of his vitals and nodded to himself: he wasn’t losing the kid, he was just dog-tired, as well he might be. Still, he was rebounding nicely, very nicely in fact; Leon looked speculatively down at him to find his eyes were open again, and looking back.

“You on the football team?” Leon asked. “Track team?”

“Uh… chess club?” Phil croaked back.

Leon grinned. “Got it. Maybe I should give chess another try, ’cause whatever it is you’ve been doing, you’re in great shape!”

“I’ve been… working on a farm since I was fourteen,” Phil told him, with a pause and a grimace. “My Mom’s… she _was_ a big believer in hard work.”

Leon wanted to swear: he’d told himself over and over again that this was a colony kid, and now there was… no colony, so there was probably nothing in the boy’s life he could safely ask him about, and it had all gone out the airlock. He changed the subject: “How’s the pain?”

Phil’s gaze directed itself inward, and presently he sucked air sharply through his teeth: “Just tried to flex my leg,” he told Leon breathlessly. “Bad idea.”

“It’s OK,” Leon reassured him, holding another syrette where he could see it. Seeing recognition and maybe the ghost of a nod, he bent down to his I.V. line. “Here.”

“Woahohhhhohhhh…” Leon wanted to laugh again: this was very clearly a clean-living country boy having his first experience with opiates. He checked his vitals again instead. All was well. He looked down again to see that Phil’s eyes were more than half closed.

“OK, I’ll probably have to wake you when the doctor and the engineers get here, but for now you can sleep. You could probably use it.”

“Mm,” he assented. Probably. “Y’r twins,” he asked, “fr’ternal or idennical?”

Leon smiled an inward, father’s smile. “Identical. Girls.”

“S’nice.” Phil smiled a vague, drugged smile. “I always thought… ’d like t’ have daughters.” Apparently the look on Leon’s face woke him briefly back up. “You know… someday…” he clarified sheepishly.

Leon didn’t bother keeping the laughter out of his voice. “Whatever you say, man. I’m not arguing. Hey, I wouldn’t dare. You’re a badass, you know that?”

Phil might have begged leave to doubt that, but sleep overtook him first.


End file.
